8 papers
From Conversation to Contribution: Characterizing Coding Agent in Open-Source Software
Zihan Fang, Yueke Zhang, Ningzhi Tang +3
AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot and Cursor have evolved from code-suggestion tools into conversational collaborators, enabling vibe-coding workflows in which developers…
How Coding Agents Fail Their Users: A Large-Scale Analysis of Developer-Agent Misalignment in 20,574 Real-World Sessions
Ningzhi Tang, Chaoran Chen, Gelei Xu +5
AI coding agents increasingly act directly within software environments, yet existing analyses of their failures rely on benchmark trajectories that miss how developers actually ex…
An Empirical Study of Agent Skills for Healthcare: Practice, Gaps, and Governance
Gelei Xu, Ningzhi Tang, Xueyang Li +4
Healthcare automation is shaped by local procedures and organizational constraints, so agent capabilities rarely transfer unchanged across settings. Agent skills, self-contained di…
NaturalEdit: Code Modification through Direct Interaction with Adaptive Natural Language Representation
Ningzhi Tang, David Meininger, Gelei Xu +4
Code modification requires developers to comprehend code, plan changes, articulate intent, and validate outcomes, making it cognitively demanding. While natural language (NL) code…
Programming by Chat: A Large-Scale Behavioral Analysis of 11,579 Real-World AI-Assisted IDE Sessions
Ningzhi Tang, Chaoran Chen, Zihan Fang +6
IDE-integrated AI coding assistants, which operate conversationally within developers' working codebases with access to project context and multi-file editing, are rapidly reshapin…
Lessons from Real-World Deployment of a Cognition-Preserving Writing Tool: Students Actively Engage with Critical Thinking and Planning Affordances
Yinuo Yang, Zheng Zhang, Ningzhi Tang +5
AI-supported writing tools show strong potential for scaffolding students' learning of argumentative writing. Prior work has demonstrated the benefits of AI-supported cognitive sca…